Overview

The Ballard Center is an academic center that interacts with students, faculty, and practitioners to search for pattern-breaking social impact.

Come join the BYU Melvin J. Ballard Center for Economic Self-Reliance, the Peery Social Entrepreneurship Program, the Impact Investing Program, and the Corporate Social Impact Program to learn how the world’s most vexing social problems are being solved. The Ballard Center matches students’ personal skills and interests with worthwhile educational experiences that lead to a meaningful life of Doing Good. Better.

The Ballard Center opened its doors in 2003 and has continued to grow since then to what is today the largest University-run social impact program in the world. In the 2018-2019 academic year over 2,500 students participated in Ballard Center classes, competitions, internships, and research. Another 5,800 students participated in one-time Ballard Center events such as the Peery Film Festival, TEDxBYU, and our clubs. The Ballard Center was designated in 2012 and 2018 as a Changemaker Campus by Ashoka U the leader in supporting social impact education at universities throughout the world.

Impact

We work with organizations of any legal structure including: nonprofits, for-profits, government entities, churches, etc. Most of our partners are hybrids. However, the Ballard Center has an extreme bias for working with organizations that can show impact as described in this article. We only work with social issue focused organizations who are one of the following:

Whether you can commit to giving the Ballard Center one hour of your time or several, there’s a place for you here. Students from any major can come to the Ballard Center for an advisement session to construct a personalized plan for incorporating our programs into their BYU experience. Sign up here.